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Dolly Parton Reveals Childhood Heartbreak

Last Updated: 11/15/2017

Photo: DFree / Shutterstock.com

@Dolly Parton, the fourth of 12 children, says her life has been anything but dull. That’s an understatement. The singer/songwriter sensation talks up her new holiday TV movie, which focuses on her early life…

Dolly Parton is pulling back the curtain on her younger years. And it’s not sugar-coated.

“A Coat of Many Colors,” NBC’s holiday offering about the country superstar’s childhood, shares delicate moments from Parton’s life, including the death of her young brother.

Newborn Larry Parton died four days after his birth in July 1955. Parton was only age 9.

“Her” baby

“My mother, through the years, when we were born, since there were so many of us, used to say, ‘This one gonna be you[r] baby,’” Parton, 69, told TV critics last week in Beverly Hills. “That just meant that you got to take extra care of it. You have got to get up with it at night and rock it back and forth.”

This baby was “her” baby, Parton said.

“So, there is a lot of heartache and stuff that goes on with that.”

The film, which premiers in December and gets its title from the singer’s 1971 country hit, shows a young Parton (played by Alyvia Alyn Lind) singing a song inspired by the death of her sibling, as she sits near his gravesite.

“This story has always meant the world to me, and I have always wanted to do some television,” she told the critics. “I was trying to think, ‘What would the people like to see?’”

“I think that they would like to see a little more about who you are and the people who make you who and what you are,” she said. “So I just felt the ‘Coat of Many Colors’ would be the perfect vehicle because it is really almost like my life story, summed up.”

While Parton will not appear on camera, she provides voiceover. She’s also an executive producer.

No plan to retire

Parton was born to poor, religious, tobacco-farming parents in Tennessee, and lived in a one-room cabin near the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. She burst on the music scene at age 13, when she performed at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry.

She’s been working ever since, with no plans of slowing down.

“I always keep saying I hope I die right in the middle of a song,” she said. “Hopefully one I wrote. Thirty years from now.”

The entertainer and businesswoman confessed that it would take something serious for her to give up her work.

“I love what I do. I have no plans to retire,” she said. “The only reason I would quit would be if my husband was ill or if I was will, and I needed to take care of him, or I needed to take care of me.